College Retreat

Jesuit Retreat Center

Guelph, Ontario

August 2007

People often ask me what spiritual direction entails. In my own Presbyterian tradition it's pretty much an unknown -- unheard of, actually -- practice, and people who have heard of it tend to associate it with spiritual disciplines and lists of "must dos," with therapy, with "some kind of wierd medieval Catholic stuff."

Spiritual direction involves helping someone with her prayer life, with her unfolding relationship with God: helping her to see God's self-communication to her in her life, and to grow and respond in that relationship. In the technical books, spiritual direction is identified to as a form or subset of pastoral care. Sounds kind of dry and mechanical. But in reality, there is nothing dry or mechanical about listening to and supporting a person who is engaged in a growing consciousness of her encounter with God. I am constantly in awe of the process, and decidedly aware of the privilege and responsibility of accompanying someone on this particular journey.

This past week, the students who signed up for the college retreat were committing themselves to some time in prayer each day, which I'm sure they managed with varying degrees of success, and to an hour a day with a spiritual director, for which I think all of them did show up. Materials had been prepared for them, and included various readings from scripture and from lives of people who have made a difference in the world, along with questions for them to consider each day. They were free to use the materials or not, to address the prescribed questions or not, and to raise their own questions about their personal challenges and dilemmas. As directors, our tasks were to listen, to help them explore the materials, to listen, to suggest other possible avenues of focus for them, to listen, to suggest ways of praying, to listen ~ all of it with the goal of helping them learn a little more about prayer, about how they themselves might look for and listen to God.

College students are just like the rest of us. They love the discovery that attentiveness to God as they walk across the campus consitutes prayer. They love the substance of prayer that emerges from a leisurely perusal of a text, stopping every few phrases or sentences to ask how what they've just read is reflected in the concrete events and activities of their own ordinary days. They love that another person is willing to listen closely to them and to take seriously the growth of their relationship with God, honoring their struggles and noticing their successes and tailoring suggestions to their needs.

I love all those things, too, especially the part where someone listens to me and takes seriously my own life of prayer. And so it seems to me to be a profound gift, this chance to share and foster, just a little bit, another individual's life with God.

Surrounded

Intuitive Hearts

Donna Funnell

Here

I spent an hour each day this past week accompanying a college student through a retreat-in-daily-life experience. I am so glad that I did.

The retreat, sponsored by the university's Catholic student ministries, took place mostly in a Presbyterian church near the campus. Last night I spent a few minutes hanging out in the kitchen with two of the other spiritual directors, whom I know from other contexts. "It's hard to know," I said, "in this process of grief, when to push yourself to move forward and when not." "One day, one hour at a time," said one of the other women, confirming my experience. "Sometimes you'll be able to say 'Yes' to things, and other times you'll know to say, "No way.'"

I am truly surrounded. They are all around me, nudging me, encouraging me, telling me that the ice beneath my feet is more solid than it feels. I keep checking in, trusting that someone will say something if I extend myself too far. But so far what I am hearing, from people in my church and Presbytery, from people at seminary, from people in my spiritual direction comunity, from my family and friends, is that I am on the right path back into the world.

I have a meeting at seminary next week. I meet with my Committee on Preparation for Ministry (Presby-speak for the folks who supervise my progress toward ordination) next month. I've been a spiritual director this week. I can only do these things because other people offer me opportunities, read what I write, hear what I say, bring me soup, and circle the wagons in countless other ways. I truly am surrounded.

Calm in Process

Inshala Glass
Las Alpujarras, Grenada
Here


FRANCISCAN BENEDICTION

May God bless you with discomfort
at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger
at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedoom and peace.

May God bless you with tears
to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, starvation, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness
to believe that you can make a difference in the world,
so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.

(The prayer is from the materals provided for those of us who are directing or making the student retreat for which I volunteered as a director this week. The retreat's theme is "Choices," certainly an important topic for college students. And for me as well, as I try to discern whether choices made in a better time still apply. The stained glass,with its focus on the colors and details of nature, seemed to fit nicely with a Franciscan prayer for growth. )

(And . . . the painting I posted on Monday? It materialized out of a search I was making for images of women in ministry, part of the same process of discernment. I think that Hildegarde is one of the best role models I coud find - a woman of great gifts and achievements, making her way with difficulty in perilous times.)

Ten Weeks

Mother's Love

A Stained Glass Abstract Quilt

Wendy Purves

Here

I can only think of one time in the past twenty-four years when I went more than a week without talking with Chicago Son for at least a few minutes, regardless of where he was in the world.

But now he is not. And ten weeks is too long to go without hearing his voice.

Imagine years. Imagine always into the future.

Prayer for a Daughter

Stellar Birth ~ Young Star Clusters

RCW 108 ~ 4,000 Light Years From Earth

NASA Image of the Day 26

Here

They are so lovely, these young women.
Made of stardust, as are we all,
they seem to have come directly from the galaxies:
Swirls of fragility, light years of strength.
Their beauty so radiant, it would seem to be the only necessity:
The soft skin, the gentle curves,
the graceful limbs and the sleek hair.
And yet you ask so much of them:
That they stumble upon death,
contend with loss,
make repairs with scotch tape and paste,
create and recreate their lives on foundations of
painfully shifting plates through which
the boiling waters of Hades bubble up.
Watch over them carefully, hold their hands gently,
wrap your arms around them passionately and protectively,
invite them into freedom, share their burdens.
Oh, please.
Offer them light, surround them with love,
Be Presence to them.


(One of my friends has asked for thoughts and prayers for her daughter who, like mine, has suffered a staggering loss in the past months. This prayer is for them, and for other young women whose optimistic ventures into adulthood have been cruelly marred by catastrophe and its aftermath.)

Art and Contemplation

Hildegarde of Bingen - Visionary - At the Table

Marsha Monroe Pippinger

Here

Art, in the form of paintings and photographs amd collages, played a big role in my CPE experience this past summer. Famous Giant Hospital has a substantial art collection, which several of us utilized on a regular basis for assistance with the labyrinthine geography of the acres and acres of campus marked by indistinguishable pathways of light gray walls. "Take the elevator across from the pool painting," or "Go down the hallway with the French landscape photos," or, "It's right next to the portrait of the scary lady."

As the summer wore on and I no longer needed to rely on the artwork as signposts to get myself from one building to another, it evolved into a form of mini-respite which I often sought during the day. I made a point of looking for my favorite pieces in the various units and patient rooms, and paid special attention to the art whenever I found myself a new section of the hospital. I don't know whether many other people even notice what's on the walls, but I often paused for a minute or two, consciously taking in the various elements of a piece, letting them serve as balm for a mind agitated by surgeries and crises and deaths. Sometimes I could practically feel my brain cells relaxing into shapes more amenable to listening than to urgent activity, restoring my capacity for hearing what my patients and their family members had to say and for noticing when they could not say it.

In the past couple of weeks, ever since returning from Oregon and Mount Angel Abbey, I've been wandering around the internet looking for art -- icons, yes, but everything else, too. It's hard to find what I imagine someone in my situation would create ~ what I would create if I could ~ so I have begun to feel like a detective obsessed with discovering clues to the mystery. What do I want? Color saturation, harsh and uneven shapes and edges, surreal interpretations of old stories. Preferably stories of people absorbing that which is impossible to absorb, and learning to live without resolution. Please do not offer me classical lines or soothing hues. I once started to cry when I saw Michaelangelo's David in Florence, but I'm not at all sure that it would move me these days. All that strength and perfection, that sense of personal destiny in an ordered cosmological hierarchy - what could it possibly communicate to me now?

All this to say -- there is some art coming up. I'm on its trail, and I will report back on what I find.

We Grieve as We Live

One of my best friends lost her husband eight months ago, and last night hosted a cast party for 100 after her daughter starred in her high school's fall musical. We were the only of her close friends not there; 100 people is a lot for us right now. I have watched my friend go back to work and pick up activites that enable her to "keep busy" -- her MO for the 21 years I have known her. If you want your kitchen repainted or your yard's fall clean up finished off, she's your girl.

I have turned to my interior life, which has probably become apparent to many of my friends for the first time as they try to take me out to meals, for coffee, to the movies. Oh, on occasion in the past a few people have responded with surprise to the discovery that I spend an hour or so in prayer most days -- it's not publicly visible time and I am otherwise actively engaged in all kinds of pursuits in my various communities. I just tell them that that's the hour that makes the acitivity and intensity of the other 16-18 possible each day. This fall, I usually find that I need a lot more than an hour.

I'm finding crowds (meaning three or more) of people to be something for which I have a little more capacity, just as my friend is finding time alone a bit more manageable. I've volunteered some time to a college student retreat program in the coming week -- I can't teach a class or field questions from a group yet, but I think that I can spend an hour or two a day listening to others describe their time in the silence.

I mentioned some of this to another friend today, along the lines of "we grieve as we live," there being no textbook with universal applicability. "I think that we are all coming to see that," she said. These sudden losses, of a husband in his 50s, of a child in his 20s, differ considerably from the exruciating but anticipated losses of parents in their 70s and 80s and older. It does seem that the authentic core of being emerges in stark relief from the desolate landscape into which we have been deposited, and that there is no solace to be found in trying to meet the expectations or timetables of other people.

Hard to Know

I am delighted with the outcome of the Presidential election, insofar as delight remains a vocabulary word for me.

But oh, it was so hard, sitting here and watching the images of Grant Park fill the television screen for all those hours. The last time we were there was for a summer evening orchestra concert with Chicago Son.

It is so hard to know, from minute to minute, which loss to grieve. There are always more than there were a minute earlier.

11PM ELECTION NIGHT

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In Which The Thing With Feathers Is Detected

We were wandering around Oregon, the four of us: The Quiet Husband, The Lovely Daughter, The Best Friend Who Also Goes to College There, and Gannet. The Best Friend said that there was supposed to be a Benedictine monastery nearby, one with a Thomas Merton collection she would like to investigate for her senior thesis on his early poetry.

"I'm up for a visit to a monastery," I said.

And so we went, east through the countryside and up a winding hillside road, to Mount Angel Abbey. I'm linking to the page with aerial photos, which are the only way of truly doing justice to what we discovered. If you poke around, you will also find images of the spectacular library.

If you were to explore the Abbey, you would be forgiven for thinking that you had landed in The Sound of Music, or in the original Benedict's Italy, as you gazed down at the surrounding fields and pastures and at Mount Hood in the distance. The quiet grounds seem to go on forever, the mustard brick buildings arranged around a spacious grassy quadrangle are meticulously cared for, and the interior of the chapel is magnificent. As I wandered alone through the chapel, with sunlight filtering across pale violet and green walls, a monk settled in to practice on the organ and music filled the space.

Icons hang at wide intervals along the walls of the chapel. I started at one end, planning to make the rounds of the walls as if I were in an art museum, as an interested observer with nothing more than a desire for a few moments of distraction.

I had not been able to pray for weeks. You look at the icon and the icon looks at you, my professor and spiritual director had often said, offering without fanfare wisdom from the ancient church gleaned from decades of experience across Christian culture. I had written his words down in a notebook, repeated them to my students when I taught high school world history, and given them little thought otherwise. You look at the icon and the icon looks at you. I found the one that looked at me. Or, perhaps, it found me.

Anyone who has grieved long and hard has known the feeling that you cannot let go of the sorrow, not without a sense of betrayal of both the one who is gone and of yourself. The transformation of that kind of torment is a lifelong task, and it begins with the most tentative of steps. Perhaps sometimes that beginning is realized only in unfamiliar places, and through unexpected gifts.

I know very little about icons, but I've learned a little about Christ Pantocrator, and this version in particular (which I eventually discovered was written by one of the monks, Brother Claude Lane), since returning home. I am told that although the icon is usually referred to in English as Christ the Ruler or Christ the Teacher, Sustainer is also a valid translation of Pantocrator. I am quite sure that Christ the Sustainer is the one who has been looking for me.

Faith and Politics

With one day to go, perhaps a post on the election is in order. Truthfully, I have paid little attention to it. But I did vote, and so did the kids, and so will the Quiet Husband, and I think that for once we are all united in our views, and it looks like our guy may actually win. Whatever the outcome, I hope that the new occupant of the White House is paying attention to Nicolas Kristof's Saturday column in The Times, urging us to "Rejoin the World," because I think that the way in which we have isolated ourselves into a corner is our most pressing foundational concern.

That said, what interested me over the week-end was what local religious leaders had to say to their congregations about the election. In my own small personal orbit:

At Mass, the priest did not mention the election once. It was All Souls' Day there and he focused on purgatory. However, during the prayer time, individuals prayed in gratitude for our right to vote, in hope that we would use it wisely, and for the safety of both candidates. And when I went out to the parking lot, I discovered that each car bore an election placard checking off John McCain as the "right" vote for those concerned with issues from what might be termed a Catholic point of view. Of course, each issue is so complex that one could, in my view, hardly identify a "Catholic position." I suppose that if I gave it some thought, I would be offended by such a partisan interruption to an experience of worship, even after the final words were said and even in the parking lot and regardless of my personal viewpoint. Whatever.

In my own Presby church, the prayers of the people also included prayers that we would exercise the gift of the vote with wisdom. And our pastor did a masterful job of weaving the matter of the election into a sermon 0n Jesus' groundedness, arguing that at the core of the agitation in our nation is a question of identity and that we have lost touch with our ground of vaues. Jesus, he pointed out, identified himself with the humiliated, the powerless, and the poor. And then he segued from Jesus' identity to our own, from the election to All Saints' Day. The core of our being, he said, is a gift of God, and our dead are beloved because they had God's breath in them.

So ~ how did it go in your place of worship this past weekend?

From My Perspective...

My goal was to get through both Catholic and Presbyterian services this morning without having to endure either the marching-band quality of For All the Saints or the jauntiness of I Sing a Song of the Saints of God, and without breaking down as the litany of names of this year's deceased was read. It was my first attempt to return to my own church since the memorial service for our son two months ago, and I managed to achieve none of my desired ends, but the morning brought other gifts ~

An early morning email from my spiritual director ~ yes, he has some extra time for me as I begin to address the question of whether/when to return to seminary, which could be as soon as in four weeks ~

Beautiful mass readings from Wisdom, Romans, and Matthew ~

(And then: Thought I was on target until after the final hymn when, sure enough, the recessional was For All the Saints ~ Which was then the processional at my own church, where I arrived just a couple of minutes too early to avoid it ~ And was eventually followed by, again, sure enough, "I Sing a Song . . .," which actually gave me a little smile as three darling little girls crowded into the pulpit to sing the first verse, and I have wonderful memories of the time period when the Lovely Daughter would have been one of those little girls) ~

Redemption (for me) with the choir's singing of Agnus Dei from Durufle's Requiem during the offering ~

The solemn reading of names, through which I remained dry-eyed until the very last and unexpected insertion of the name of the father of the friend with whom I was seated; as I said to her, "It's always the surprises that get you" ~

The hands and arms reaching out to touch and embrace me as I walked down the center of the church toward communion, and the tears of our pastor as she served me ~

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful communion music: In the Singing and Jesus the Lord Said, 'I Am the Bread.'

So. I made it. And I feel cared for. Maybe I can do it again.

Survival Skills

It's a beautiful fall week-end. A little chilly, but clear and colorful.

My group of women friends is off at a lakeside cottage. I had planned to go this time -- spring and fall trips last year were out for me, due to illness in the fall and exams in the spring. But I'm not there. I've discovered that time spent in groups of people, even small groups of my very best friends, requires skills I have lost. Skills usually exercised without a conscious thought, apparently. But, for now at least, any ability I had to listen to and participate in a multilayered conversation with people saying and hearing and feeling different things, is just gone.

One of my friends said that she would reassure the others that I miss them, too, and that I'm not avoiding them because I don't think they can understand.

Well, yes, I do miss them. But, although they are my very best friends in the world, and have taken good care of all of my family over the past two months, it has never occurred to me that any of them can understand. I have a good imagination, but I'm not delusional. I am not staying away because people can't understand. (Although the fact that anyone might think so demonstrates the truth of the statement.) I didn't try to explain further. Sometimes even one-on-one is too much for me.

I may have lost my capacity for group interaction, but I am honing silence as a skill for negotiating the terrain of sorrow.

A Protestant at Mass

A seminary friend of mine, unfamiliar with monastic practice until last fall, questioned the usefulness of people who spend much of their largely sequestered lives in prayer. Utility is sometimes, in Protestant venues, defined in a rather limited way. As my readers know, I consider it a great gift of God in my life that both Catholic and Protestant worlds are accessible to me. My participation in one or the other is frequently marked by some discomfort -- I am always aware of what is "missing" or different -- but I suppose that that is a small price to pay for the grace of versatility, and for doors that are opened more often than they are closed.

**********

The Carmelite chapel, its spare contemporary architecture almost devoid of decoration, is about half full when I arrive at the last minute, almost blown in the door by a bitter fall wind at the end of the day. I slip into my usual place on the far side, where I have been hiding out these past weeks. I had not realized until this terrible event in our lives occurred that there is no place in our usual church services for those whose days and nights are enveloped in grief. Our worship, albeit usually traditional and even stately, bespeaks energy, joy, life -- and crowds out those whose endurance does not extend that far. The Carmelites are filled with a gentle sense of peace, and offer a spiritual space that encompasses people in all states of being.

I note that in the opening hymn the congregation, mostly Carmelite nuns and people my age or older, sings the word "God" whenever the word "He" is printed in the hymnal. And then I am startled by the immediate appearance of the priest, wearing bright red vestments. Why red in October, I wonder? The color really stands out on this dreary day. "The Lord be with you," he says. "And also with you," we respond. He is young, and earnest, and hopeful, and sweet. He reminds us that it is the feast day of Saints Simon and Jude. That doesn't mean much to me, but I reflect on how I have wished, more often lately than usual, that we Protestants had not abandoned attentiveness to saints. I am much in need of role models these days, and grateful for my knowledge of the medieval women mystics, women whose encounter with the presence of God was not diminshed by hardship and loss.

The mass proceeds. One of the Carmelites reads the epistle lesson, and she and another of her sisters sing the responsive refrain to the psalm so that the congregation can follow along. One of the most striking things to me, as I have attended these and other masses, has been the lack of Bibles in the pews and the lack of information on the readings in the bulletins. It seems odd to me that Scripture is read and sung without citations or texts being provided. And also difficult -- I am much more visual than auditory, and so I am considerably hampered in my attentiveness with nothing in front of me with which to connect. When I mentioned this to a friend last week-end, she told me that her priest believes that the Word should be proclaimed and the congregation should listen. All well and good for those of us who are natural listeners, I suppose. Those of us who are not are somewhat deprived.

When the priest reads the gospel passage I am in better shape, having already spent considerable time with it earlier in the day. And he does a nice job of delivering a carefully considered homily. The text is the Lucan call of the disciples, an episode of some relevance to me personally, as I try to discern in the wake of disaster whether my call to ministry has been completely eradicated. The priest's thesis is that the twelve whom Jesus calls could not possibly meet any contemporary management guru's idea of a stellar corporate team. They are, instead, "extravagantly flawed" individuals. As extravagantly as I am? I wonder. I also catch in passing that this priest always uses the pronoun "He" when he refers to God. I still like him. His love for God is all over his face.

We move on to the eucharistic portion of the service. I drift in and out of awareness at this point; I can never keep track of the order, I have to remember not to say the Protestant ending of the Lord's Prayer out loud, and I can't participate anyway. Sometimes I spend these minutes in an internal consideration of the various Protestant attitudes and beliefs with respect to Communion, but today I don't feel particularly analytical. I just wait for the actual distribution, when I can sit quietly and open my heart to God. I am extremely grateful for this interlude of five or so minutes of peace in the presence of others who are praying at a time when my own capacity to listen for God is considerably diminished.

When the mass is over, I step to the back of the chapel to look out the huge windows at the walled garden courtyard behind the monastery. I had not noticed it before; it's beautiful, even in what has now become something like sleet. As I walk back through the chapel toward the doors, a couple of the sisters stop to hug me and thank me for coming. They have probably forgotten my name, but they know what has happened and why I am there, and they always thank me for joining them. I am, as always, so touched by their gentle and unobtrusive acceptance that I cannot manage my own words of gratitude.

*********

"Useful" seems such a crass word in these circumstances. I would argue that gracious, and loving, and generous, apply. Words that one might apply to Jesus.

Stolen Goods (Eight Weeks)

We've lost our son. Two people dear to me have recently been diagnosed with cancer, and one has made relationship decisions that have significant and difficult ramifications for me.

Enough.

Of course, my protests do not make things stop.

I wander around, looking for signs of possibility. Here are a few I've picked up along the way:

"Despair is a loss of our sense of connectedness."

~ David Richo
~ found on Spiritually Directed

"I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a functional and pious thing for all believers to do, is in fact, a descriptor for inner experience. That is why all spiritual teachers mandate prayer so much. They are saying, "Go inside and know for yourself!". . . . As Jesus graphically puts it, prayer is 'going to your private room and shutting the door and [acting] in secret.' (Matthew 6:16)"

~ Richard Rohr in Hidden Things: Scripture as Spirituality
~ found on Purpletologically Speaking

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It's a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence.The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it. All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be present. These disciplines exist so that we can see what is, see who we are, and see what is happening.

~ Richard Rohr in Everything Belongs
~ found on The Mercy Blog

It's difficult to be present these days.

A Thank You, via Willamette Unversity

I am extremely fond of beautiful Willamette University, where the Lovely Daughter is a senior. Recently named one of the best urban walks in Oregon, the campus boasts magnificent sequoias, numerous gardens, and a small stream running through the center:

One of my favorite Willamette places is the rose garden on State Street, just across from the capital building. As I wandered there ten days ago, I thought of my new blogging friend ~ master gardener, gifted teacher, Ignatian co-conspirator, and artist ~ who had sent me a handcrafted stained glass piece as an offer of consolation in this bleak time. If the winter light around here ever co-operates, I'll post a photograph. In the meantime, images of roses in gratitude for a gift of light:

Oregon Coast

The week-end brought other pieces of news, either of which under more usual life circumstances would have sent me reeling far from any sense of repose.

Herewith, in response, views of the ocean which, I have been gently reminded, is the one whose name means peace.

Silver Falls State Park - Magis

If you are inclined to pay attention to St.Ignatius, you'll get the magis. If not, let's just say that in the fall it seems that the earth always offers more.

And, to my personal way of thinking, the moss-encased branches so prevalent in Oregon seem to belong to a stage set for Wicked. One expects to see Elphaba behind every tree trunk.

Silver Falls State Park - Photo Petite

South Falls

October 2008

When we were in Oregon last week-end, we took The Lovely Daughter and one of her friends (one of her lifelong best friends from home, who also attends college out there) to Silver Falls State Park for a little waterfall walk.

The Oregon rain forest is a lot like the North Carolina rain forest, except that the Oregon trees are a LOT bigger than any tree anywhere in North Carolina.

(Apparently the technology of BIG PICTURES remains beyond me. I gave it a couple of hours this afternoon and it looks like I need a couple of weeks. Eventually, I suppose. In the meantime, this one enlarges nicely with a click.)

A Little Break - of Sorts

One of the wiser things I've read in the past weeks suggests permitting yourself to take a break from grief, noting that we takes breaks from everything else and we need to get away from grieving on occasion, too. True enough. At various points in my working and student life, when the onslaught of expectations has seemed overwhelming, I've made detailed calendars in an effort to find some solace in the light at the end of the tunnel. Only on rare occasions have those calendars, identifying multiple tasks to be accomplished in every part of every day, represented a span as long as fourteen consecutive days in duration. This time, there will never be a light at the end of the tunnel, and we have put only fifty-one days behind us. Fifty-one days of unremitting pain.

So, I am going to take a little break, which I am sure will unleash sighs of relief among my readers. It won't be a 100% break - not matter what I say or do, whom I encounter, or how I pass my time, there is only one underlying reality, and it has a way of popping up. But I will try to limit it to those natural appearances.

And so ~

One of my frustrations with blogger has been the impossibility of posting BIG PICTURES, which were so much fun during my AOL Journal days. I'm not much of a technie, and I've never been able to figure out how to do it over here. But with the imminent demise of AOL Journals, a number of bloggers have made their way over here, and one of them, to my delight, is my former mentor and technophile buddy, Sunflower Kat of Walk with Me. Her photography is often wondrous, and in no time flat she mastered the BIG PICTURE blogger conundrum. I have her instructions, I have her email, and I have 100 photographs from Oregon. So I'm going to play around for a few days and try to enjoy myself a little. There won't be much writing, and what there is will still reflect the sense of loss that never recedes, but I'm hoping that some of the images will work out.

And ~

In the category of Life Goes On, Gregarious Son and I voted today. With about 75 people ahead of us (lunchtime at the downtown Board of Elections), it took about half an hour, but that was about half the time it took four years ago at our local polling place, the church on the corner, at 7:00 am with maybe 15 people in line. The poll workers were gracious and efficient, the voters were relaxed and even jovial, and it has now been my pleasure to cast two historic votes this year.

And ~

I went back to my spiritual direction training program this week. It only meets once a month this year, so I have an idea that it might be manageable. It was an extremely difficult few hours, with a couple of conversations that nearly sent me over the edge, but I had done the reading and written the paper and I did not start to cry and I did not need to excuse myself. I also signed up for seminary classes, only because this is the week that that had to be done. I have no idea what, if anything, is possible there. Emails from professors have been generous and encouraging, but due to the quarter system, the unfortunate reality is that those classes begin in only six weeks and the first weeks lie right between Thanksgiving and Christmas, two holidays I would just as soon not acknowledge this year. Or maybe ever. (Yes, somewhat problematic in ministry.) I will probably return for the first week of classes and see how it goes. I am not overly optimistic and I know that my life has changed in ways that are not remotely apparent to me yet. We'll see.

And, finally ~

In an effort to be positive rather than negative, I have some advice about what to say to the newly bereaved when you run into us, rather than what not so say. (Oh, that second list lengthens every day!) It's pretty simple. "How is your morning/afternoon/evening going?" If I think that you care enough to ask a specific question and I think that you might actually be interested, I might be able to respond with something equally specific, and it will be a big help to me. And if all I can manage is, "Really sh--ty," that's a big help to me, too. Just so you know.

So ~ some messing around on the blog and maybe some BIG PICTURES coming up soon.

Ashes to Ashes

"Easy for him to say, hard for you to do," said the funeral home director when we told him that our son had indicated a wish for his ashes to be scattered, and then tried to convince us, albeit with restraint, that an elaborate urn placed in one of the cemetery's glass cases in the new mausoleum was the way to go. My father has also said that he wants to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered, and has been specific as to the locale. When that time comes, I will be better prepared for funeral industry resistance.

Oh, what to do with these bodies of ours when they are no longer animated by soul and spirit, by hope and sorrow? During my summer CPE at Gigantic Hospital, I observed bodies of every size, color, age, and condition, often praying over them as family members clung to each other, and sometimes praying over them in solitude because no one from the family had shown up, or because they had been unable to bear the solid certainty of loss any longer and had left the hospital swiftly and in silence. But I did not have to perform the subsequent tasks of the nurses, or make the next plans with the families.

In my own family, closed caskets have been the rule. There has been a general undercurrent of agreement to "remember them as they lived," and so I saw none of my grandparents, nor my aunt, mother, brother, or first stepmother after they died. My mother and brother were buried while I was still in the hospital recovering from the car accident; I'm not sure that I even knew of their deaths before they were in the ground. Only with my last stepmother, and only because I was holding her hand when she died, was I able to spend time in her presence afterward, absorbing her transition to someplace unknown to us.

In none of these situations did I have to make any decisions about what came next. At the hospital, people took their heartbreak and their mourning out the door with them. In my family of origin, my father has usually been the one to direct the events of the week after a death, and has countenanced little in the way of participation of others. Only with my grandmother, to whom I was especially close and who died a couple of years ago, was I able to insist upon something of my own vision of a memorial service, none of which applied to the care or disposition of her body.

I have tried to do things differently. Following the magnificent guidance provided by the wife of one of my patients this past summer, who with gentle authority and great love gathered her family of siblings and adult children and spouses for major decisions and for the final difficult hours of her husband's life, I brought three generations of us together to plan our son's memorial service, and ensured that the Quiet Husband and I involved our children in every decision about our son's remains. We were also graced by the presence of many friends who had recent stories to share over the kitchen table about bodies, funeral homes, cremations, cemeteries, and the scattering of ashes -- all in gentle, generous, and sometimes humorous conversations in which everyone seemed to intuit the wisdom that we each have different needs and expectations and desires with respect to what finally happens to the bodies of those we love.

To give the funeral home director his due, I believe that he was more interested in protecting us than in selling urns when he told us that scattering ashes would be difficult to do. (A few weeks later he was most helpful in answering all the related questions about practical issues.) Many people in our death-resistant culture accept the handling of its processes by the experts, believing that it may be easier to force its tangibility out of their minds than to acknowledge it for what it is. And while I personally am not so inclined, preferring always to see and hear and touch for myself, who can blame them? The confrontation with the physicality of death, with its insistence on the completeness and finality of the breach it creates, is difficult. But it is also the reality.

And so last week I waded into the Pacific, off a coast which our son had never reached in his short lifetime of great adventures, and scattered some of his ashes onto the gentle swells of water. It was in the end not so hard to do, for, in the words of Isak Dineson that one of of my friends used to share with us, "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."

As it turns out, she was not entirely accurate. There are some things for which there is no cure. But for those, the ocean offers its embrace and, sometimes, the sparkle of sunlight across its surface.

Ashes to Ocean (Seven Weeks)

Oregon Coast

October 2008

Here and Eternity

How many children do you have?

An ordinary, run-of-the-mill, small talk question, repeated over and over again as a natural part of daily life, bearing the potential for endlessly rolling waves of pain.

At my niece's wedding two weeks ago, my brother introduced me to friends. "This is my sister and these are her children." No No No, I wanted to scream. These are TWO of my children. These are TWO-THIRDS of my children.

But. One does not sink onto the floor and wail at a wedding reception.

My son . . . one of my sons . . . my surviving son . . . says that he catches himself constantly. So many of his stories begin with the words, "My brother and I . . .". But as he begins to speak he realizes that he does not want to go there, not with new acquaintances. He especially does not want to field the questions that have always been addressed to him as a twin.

Who am I, without all of my children? I could describe myself in any number of ways, but what do I care? There is only one irrevocable part of my identity, and it has been shattered almost beyond recognition.

And so. Tomorrow the Quiet Husband and I head for Oregon to visit The Lovely Daughter. Gregarious Son goes to New York City for a much needed break with friends. And Chicago Son is somewhere else. With us but not with us.

We have always been a travelling family. We have all spent a lot of time separated from one another, often across two continents. But cell phones and emails and airplanes and our love for each other shortened the distances.

It doesn't work like that anymore. I am always in two places now. In this world, with two of my children. And somewhere else, where my heart is full of the one who is not here at all.

Six Weeks: Suddenly I Have Things To Say

I have been thinking a lot about Psalm 88 in the context of preaching. I can see why it doesn't pop to the top of the list of homiletical text choices. The majority of sermons I've heard in my life have been of the exhortative variety, and it's difficult to imagine sending a congregaton off with the admonishment to walk in darkness.

But there's another way. It was when I first heard Barbara Brown Taylor's evocative sermons (at Chautauqua, where she has preached many times) that it dawned on me that I might be a preacher. How well I remember that stunned realization almost literally spreading through and warming my entire self: if that's what preaching can be, then maybe I am...?

It took me a very long time to get out of bed yesterday. I won't admit to how long. But once I had achieved that most monumental of tasks, which is exactly what it is during a time of profound grief, and had taken a shower, I called the director of my spiritual direction training program, who happened to be free, and drove over to the university to see her. We spent about an hour reflecting on our family's loss, on my situation, and on what I might do about returning to seminary and about returning to the spiritual direction program. Seminary is more than two hours away and my return is going to require some planning (although the administration and professors have been generously willing to go the extra mile in accomodating my needs). The spiritual direction program is right here, but this year entails a practicum and I am not about to attempt that at the moment. We concluded that I would go to this month's class next week and we would think about the practicum in a few months.

The director mentioned a difficult period in her own life and noted how grateful she had been at that time for work, for college and graduate classes to prepare and teach. "I know this loss is different," she said, "and I know that it will never not be with you, that it changes who you are, and that 'distraction' is not really the word that you are looking for." I responded by talking of one of the aspects of grief we all know about intellectually but still cannot overcome when we are personally affected: that everytime you do or think about something else, you feel that you have betrayed the person who is gone. "Somehow," I said, " if I am going to have any kind of a life again, I find to find a way to hold the two in balance: the life and work that go on, and the vast ocean of loss and sorrow that accompany them."

As I left, I thought about Pslam 88. The balance involves learning to live in a way in which ordinary tasks and events, laughter and frustrations, are intricately woven into the fabric of darkness. If I were to depict this balance in a quilt, it would be one in which patches in all shapes and shades of black were sewn together with threads of all colors, some of them even shiny and sparkly. A quilt on which you could stretch out on the grass in the sunshine, a quilt in which you could roll around and curl up in the darkness of a stormy day, a quilt which you could hang on the wall and gaze upon as you pray to embrace and live out both darkness and light.

Cynthia, whose husband died last spring, wrote yesterday about those events of life from which everything else streams as "befores" and "afters." I wrote about those events once; I can't remember whether my words were here or in a sermon, but I know that I said that the things that we think constitute such markers -- the long-planned for graduations, weddings, and births -- tend not to be nearly as significant in terms of interior transformation as those which are unplanned, sudden, and cataclysmic. Those other, expected events - they change your status. The catastrophes change your very being.

Cynthia acknowledeges that it is too soon to know where this phase of life will take her. I commented that yet another, seldom-mentioned, aspect of loss is the coming to terms with the reality that we are now someone else, not by choice, and learning to be that person.

And so. Psalm 88. Those words of the psalmist -- full of trouble, overwhemed, engulfed -- those are the ones I am looking for. I am learning to live as a different person. Gingerly and tentatively. But I am learning.

Psalm 88

We have been to Chicago to empty our son's apartment.

We have taken the first steps to open an estate. For our child.

I have wished many times over the past week that I had gotten to know my mother's mother better than I did. For the usual complex assortment of factors that affect family dynamics, although not for want of trying on their part, my brother and I never had the same depth of connection with our maternal grandparents that we did with my father's parents. Now, for my own selfish reasons, I am so sorry that I did not have more of a relationship with the grandmother whose daughter died at 28. I want to know what those first weeks and months were like for her. I want to know what the rest of her life without her beloved daughter was like for her.

Psalm 88 is the only one that applies. I have been interested to discover how many of its readers are puzzled, alarmed even, by its utter bleakness, its complete unwillingness to resolve itself in solace or praise. It does not even merit a mention in Textweek, which offers resources and commentaries that go almost all the way back to the beginnings of Christianity, as a possible preaching text. Apparently our own 21st century western culture is not unique in its reluctance to stare unreservedly into the abyss of darkness.

Only one psalm out of 150 speaks to this time. I know that I am going to begin to cycle through some of the other psalms of lament soon, the ones that do end in expressions of hope. But thank God that there is one to which to turn when the authenticity and power of unrelieved anguish is called for.

Five Weeks Almost

Ansel Adams

I'm worn out. I looked up synonyms for "depleted." Drained, sapped, impoverished, bankrupted. They all apply.

We went to a family wedding this past week-end, a beautiful event that went off without a hitch and was surely one of the most difficult celebrations I have ever endured.

I have to do some very much harder things in the next two weeks.

And somehow, as Lisa says, I have to continue to place one foot in front of another on the journey that goes from here to the new way of carrying it all.

For now,

I can't write publicly anymore. Cynthia says there is no comfort. And it is becoming impossible to describe a geography where the terrain is so desolate and the silence so immense.

I will let some of Mary Oliver's words, written after the death of her partner of many years, open the door to my hiatus. I am nowhere near the final verses that speak of laughter and admiration. Maybe someday. I am, I suppose, practicing.

********************

Heavy

~ by Mary Oliver

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had His hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among the lions),

"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it --

books, bricks, grief --

it's all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down."

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled --

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love to which there is no reply?

The Hereafter

I've been thinking a lot about a woman I met early in my CPE program this past summer. Privacy considerations preclude me from providing many details, but I can say that I was called for a withdrawal of care (life support), that the initial phone call gave me the impression that the family had made the decision, and that that impression was far from accurate.

The final decision involved most of my afternoon and much of the evening of the on-call chaplain, and included a consultation with a Catholic colleague who carried around a little book outlining the Catholic position on extraordinary life support measures and the cessation of same.

At one point the anguished woman asked me whether I believed in heaven. "I do," I said.

"What is it like?" she asked, with that intensity that you only encounter in these situations, an intensity that demands absolute honesty.

"I don't know," I said.

I am not consoled by a belief that we will meet our loved ones in heaven, that life there will somehow maximize the good things of life here. (It seems that C.S. Lewis and I are in agreement on this one -- he mentions cigars as a would-be desirable feature.) I am not by any means a Biblical inerrantist, but I tend to believe that when the Bible says we shall be changed, it means that we shall be changed in a way we cannot imagine as long as we are still here.

I was intrigued when I spent an afternoon summer before last walking in the cemetery behind the Glasgow Cathedral and picked up a guidebook, from which I learned that the great cemeteries founded in the second half of the 19th century (like the one in which I walk at home) were designed on the basis of a fairly new-at-that-time development of sentiment surrounding death. The park-like atmosphere was meant to foster opportunities to "visit with" the dead, and certainly many people continue to derive great comfort from the sense that they are doing just that.

And maybe they are.

I don't know.

Gratitude, Burnoff, and Confusion

Isle Royale in the Fog

1. I don't know to whom I should be more grateful: Sarah Palin or Tina Fey. Or perhaps the Russians, the ten or twelve of them surveyed by Alaskans gazing across the water every morning before breakfast. Whomever -- I'm just thankful for anyone who can give me a moment of laughter.

2. Many, many, pre-child years ago, the Quiet Husband and I went backpacking a couple of times on Isle Royale, a national park island in Lake Superior above the U.P. Because of time constraints, we went back and forth via float plane rather than ferry. The plane from the mainland in Houghton, Michigan to Isle Royale's Rockport Harbor always seemed an iffy proposition -- you'd wake up in the early morning to a town blanketed by fog, and listen to the locals' breakfast reassurance that "it'll burn off soon." Which it did.

I have had, over the past couple of days, a few short periods of my own burnoff. The fog that has enshrouded me lifts for 20, 30 minutes at a time, and my mind functions with clarity. It feels good. It feels like me. It doesn't last, and the ensuing fog is as thick and impermeable as before, but it offers a sense of hope.

3. When I began seminary last year, it was with a great deal of trepidation, which only increased over the first several days as numerous young students told me with great confidence that they knew they were following God's will by the ease with which things had fallen into place for them -- money, jobs, housing. It wasn't until I began to meet the students of my generation that I found peers whose experience mirrored my own -- students struggling to manage their own tuition and that of their college-age children, students quitting or changing employment, students making challenging commutes, students transforming or dismantling well-established lives to undertake seminary educations.

So no, I was never in the group of people who felt able to evaluate their calls to ministry on the basis of the ease with which they were unfolding. But the death of my child? Off the charts.

I have no idea what to think or how to proceed.

Book-Ends

I have known, for almost all of my life, that people, no matter how beautiful, how gifted, how beloved, vanish. That the universe is a hazardous and uncertain place.

October 1960. I am seven. My mother and brother are gone.

October 2008. I am fifty-five. My son is gone.

Baring war, holocaust, or natural disaster, what are the chances?

Perhaps I am intended to uncover a new solidarity with survivors of the foregoing: war, etc.

But I can be forgiven, I think, for at the moment anticipating the future with little more than dread.